Art and Science of Laboratory Medicine. Clinical laboratory and biomedical science related news, abstracts and images for medical laboratory professionals, students and other laboratory geeks.

Art and Science of Laboratory Medicine

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

Proteins in blood can predict type 1 diabetes

Certain proteins in the blood of children can predict incipient type 1 diabetes, even before the first symptoms appear. A team of scientists at the Helmholtz Zentrum München, partners in the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD), reported these findings in the ‘Diabetologia’ journal.

The study group were able to identify 41 peptides from 26 proteins that distinguish children with autoantibodies from those without, reports Dr. Christine von Toerne, a scientist in the Research Unit Protein Science who shared first authorship of the work with Michael Laimighofer, a doctoral candidate in Jan Krumsiek's junior research group at the Institute of Computational Biology. Striking in their evaluations: A large number of these proteins are associated with lipid metabolism. Two peptides - from the proteins apolipoprotein M and apolipoprotein C-IV - were particularly conspicuous and were especially differently expressed in the two groups, von Toerne adds. In autoantibody-positive children, it was furthermore possible to reach a better estimate of the speed of the diabetes development using the peptide concentrations of three proteins (hepatocyte growth factor activator, complement factor H and ceruloplasmin) in combination with the age of the particular child.

The biomarkers that they have identified allow a more precise classification of this presymptomatic stage and they are relatively simple to acquire from blood samples